Building Bridges in a Troubled Region
By Dr Akbar Ahmed
American University
Washington, DC

I first met Magnus Marsden in the 1990s in Cambridge, where I had been the Iqbal Fellow (Chair of Pakistan Studies) and based at Selwyn College. I was impressed by this aspiring anthropologist and student sharing a mutual interest in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Marsden and I would frequently interact and engage in conversations about the tribal peoples who lived on either side of the international border. Given his commitment, seriousness, and empathy for the people he would study, even at that young age, I knew he would make a name for himself in the field.
Two decades later, Marsden has lived up to all the expectations I had of him. He is today a professor of social anthropology at the University of Sussex and Director of Sussex Asia Center. Besides, he is acknowledged as a top anthropologist in one of the world’s most important regions, and working to humanize the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan and their efforts to engage in the global economy.
While Afghan traders play an active role in the Pakistani economy — buying and selling products like tangerines, cloth, and carpets, and relying upon access to the port in Karachi — they remain apprehensive about entering Pakistan for business.
As a teenager in the 1980s and early 1990s, through his exposure to the coverage which the Afghan Mujahideen were receiving in the West and the attention drawn to Pakistan through our two cricket championship victories, Marsden began to develop a strong interest in Islam and the Pakistan/Afghanistan border region. After teaching English for a year in northern Pakistan in 1995 and studying anthropology at the University of Cambridge, Marsden went on to earn his PhD in anthropology, writing on Islam in Central and South Asia and the lived experience of Islam in northern Pakistan, particularly in Chitral. He then proceeded to study this region in a post-Cold War context. This experience opened the path to his latest project, focused on Afghan trading networks and the lived experience of being an Afghan trader in Afghanistan, throughout South and Central Asia, in Europe, and elsewhere around the world.
This knowledge he distils into his recent book, Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants Across Modern Frontiers (Hurst 2016). Marsden works to show the human side of Afghan trade and to counter the common stereotypes facing Afghan traders and the Afghan people more broadly through his rich, detailed ethnographic research. Noting that much of the international coverage of Afghanistan focuses on tribal and ethnic divisions and portrays the Afghan people as backward and insular, Marsden aims to convey the sophistication of Afghan traders and their interactions with cultural environments around the world. Analyzing common experiences for Afghan traders engaging in international trade and recounting first-hand stories of Afghan traders living around the world, Marsden establishes a strong, nuanced basis for understanding this key element of the Afghan economy and society.
Marsden strongly emphasizes the diplomatic, bridge-building role Afghan traders play at home and abroad, transforming their role beyond that of conducting mere economic transactions to actually affecting the affairs of the regions in which they work. He looks at how Afghan traders stand at the nexus of many different cultures working in London, remarking, “They sell cloth made in France to West African communities, fish imported from the Pacific Ocean to West Indians, and Kenyan halal meat to British Muslims.” Marsden also discusses the important role Afghan traders have played in bringing together populations which had been separated by the political tensions of the Cold War and the post-Soviet world, shaping modern Central Asian affairs. On this point, he writes, “The traders explored in this book connected markets and trading spaces that were part of very different types of political economies, including those of Peshawar, Dubai, Dushanbe, Moscow, and London.”
On a broader note, Marsden’s field research also demonstrates the importance of actively interacting with others and getting to know people on their own terms. Were one to just ask a casual observer about Afghan traders, they may cast them as being singularly focused on raising a profit, shifty as to their Muslim faith and Afghan identity, or even as drug dealers. Yet, Marsden refuses to buy into this narrative and demonstrates that, in fact, the global community of Afghan traders is far more nuanced and complex.
Marsden makes it clear though that Afghan traders, despite their important role in regional and global affairs and their ability to overcome great obstacles, do sometimes remain at the mercy of the social, economic, and political tensions which dominate the region. In fact, as Marsden’s research finds, while they play an active role in buying and selling Pakistani products such as tangerines, cloth, and carpets, and rely upon access to the port in Karachi, in turn supporting our own economy, many Afghan traders are apprehensive about entering Pakistan on business. Often, their trade convoys are ransacked and those trading such products as cement will be attacked by people working to reduce competition against our own cement production. Furthermore, we still continue to view Afghans as primitive, warring peoples. To improve our own relations with Afghanistan and support peace in our own backyard, this book and this message needs to be heard.
In fact, if we take the time to listen to the scholars and peace builders of the world, like Magnus Marsden, and learn from their humanism, perhaps we can begin to treat not only Afghan traders, but outsiders and minority groups in our own nation with the dignity and respect they inherently deserve.
(The writer is an author, poet, filmmaker, playwright, and the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University in Washington, DC. He formerly served as the Pakistani High Commissioner to the UK and Ireland. He tweets @AskAkbar)